


After Three Weeks

by elle_stone



Category: Rent - Larson
Genre: F/M, Nostalgia, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-10
Updated: 2007-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-06 17:06:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/421269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maureen remembers her relationship when it was new, when she could still believe in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Three Weeks

**Author's Note:**

> Written for challenge number 292, Mark/ first time/ honey, on the speed_rent community on livejournal.

“This is the first time I’ve used this camera,” he says, “so I want this to be good.”

 

She smiles and throws her arms into the air. “You’re filming me. It will be perfect!”

 

They are in the park. She can’t see his face because his camera is up to his eye, but he laughs a little and tells her to look sexy.

 

“When do I not?”

 

It is spring. New flowers, green grass, the waking up of birds and insects, bright, warm sun, new love. They have known each other for three weeks.

 

He tells her, “Maureen, you have fire,” “Maureen, you have spark,” “Maureen, you have passion.” He tells her that she is the first person he has ever met who really takes on life. She thinks he could be the one.

 

*

 

Later, the film will show:

 

Trees with their first green leaves. The color is a little off, the picture a little grainy. A bright glare of sun flares off to the side. Maureen stands just out off its reach. She is very pale after winter, and her hair is very dark in contrast, and she is wearing a white t-shirt and black skirt. Mark backs away just as she calls out, _It will be perfect!_ , and as the picture grows bigger, her bare feet are revealed amid the sharp new blades of grass.

 

She can’t remember him saying it, but on the tape his voice clearly tells her, _You are beautiful,_ just before he tells her to look sexy.

 

_When do I not?_ she calls to him, and her body moves and her expression changes, and the wind blows so that the flowers—so bright in her memories but here, comparatively pale—bend back and her hair flows into her face. She pushes it away and she is laughing.

 

_Come here!_ she orders. _You’re so far away!_

 

_No, no. Close up is later. Let me admire you from here._

 

She pouts but can’t be mad at him. 

 

(It is not that kind of day, not the stormy weather, the crashing thunder and pouring rain that soaked her, that left her dripping on the floor as she heard him raise his voice for the first time—the background of their first fight. It is the not the sudden winter cold snap of the first time she left him, not the suffocating heat spell of the only time he left her, not even the dying leaves and last warm rain of the year that fell over them when he came back.)

 

_Have it your way_ , she says, and blows him a kiss.

 

His laughter is heard again, here, a happy and free and almost quiet sort of laugh, which she must struggle to hear again within her mind.

 

Yet, still, it does not sound to her now as it seems to sound there, recorded on that jumping, skipping film, the soundtrack to her own wide-grin, her slowly, carefully straightened body and perfect pose.

 

The image becomes smaller, more contracted, herself the focus now to the exclusion of the blue sky and the yellow sun and the green grass. He is moving closer. She sweeps her hair out of her eyes. She tries to look serious, stately, like those pictures of fair ladies she has seen in books and museums.

 

He must have done something just then, behind the camera and beyond the reach of its sight—must have looked at her or smiled at her in some certain, special way—because suddenly her face softens, and she whispers, _Oh. Honey bear._

 

Her voice can just barely be heard.

 

_Honey bear?_ he repeats, and laughs a short, harsh, snorting laugh.

 

She shrugs, her shoulders moving so slowly it is as if there were something wrong with the tape itself. _I’ll have to think of something else to call you_ , then, she says.

 

_Please_ , he answers. His voice is unreal, disembodied and distant, almost ghostlike as it is superimposed upon that image of a sunny day in early spring. But for the Maureen in the picture, the Maureen whose eyes are clear and bright and sparkling, the Maureen who is not looking, now, at the lens, but at something just beyond it, that voice seems to be the whole world.

 

She was thinking, at the time: perhaps he will be the one who will make her stay.


End file.
